Zune Patrol Zune Review Part 1: Can I rant about the iPod first? - zune reviews - Zune News, Live, Player, MP3, Microsoft Zune, Communities, MP3 Player, iPod, iPod Killer, Zune

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- - Zune Patrol Zune Review Part 1: Can I rant about the iPod first?
  - Original contribution by: jsexton
  - 11/17/2006 11:21:35 AM
  - I've owned a 40G pre-video iPod for 2 years and for the most part I've been happy with it. I fell in love with the ability to take my entire frickin' music collection with me when I leave home. How great is that? I like the portability, and I find myself wanting more.
    
    However I have had some frustrations iPod. I received the iPod as a gift, and on that very day I found it that the USB synchronization would not work with my primary production computer (a laptop). For whatever reason (I was never able to completely resolve it), the relationship between iTunes, my iPod and the USB was not going well. iTunes would fail to recognize that an iPod was connected, sometimes right in the middle of an update. Furthermore, iTunes often seems to crash and leave background applications running, with no way to stop them other than Task Manager. Good thing I have some other computers around. So with some testing I found that if I relegated iTunes to an older tower PC the synchronization was at least a little more stable.
    
    I loaded about 5000 songs from CD into the iPod over the first month I had it. Before long I was regularly getting the sad face icon during the synchronization process. While the user-friendly message was crystal clear: "my iPod is sad," it was not clear how to comfort my poor iPod. Usually the special restart sequence would make it happy again, and I could try another update. Eventually I found a repeatable way to keep the iPod happy and continue to load even more songs.
    
    Then one day the sad face would not go away. Fortunately it was within my warranty period, so I returned the iPod to my retailer where it was sent to Apple for repair. I haven't had a sad face since, but I still proudly leave the factory repair sticker on back of the unit.
    
    But that was not the end of my frustration. iTunes continues to be a freakishly unfriendly application from a company that likes to tout the friendliness of its products. If you touch iTunes wrong, or connect an iPod at the wrong time, you'll end up with copies of iTunes running in the background and no synchronization. They are any number of functions that you cannot perform without using a mouse, which is unfortunate indeed for accessibility. The idiotic search "feature" of responding to each and every character you type with a filtered list of songs cannot be disabled. I hate this feature because usually I know exactly what I'm looking for and I don't want to wait a second after every character I type.
    
    So I'm looking forward using my Zune. I don't expect it to resolve the issues I've had with the iPod. In fact, I won't be surprised if it also has a gap between songs. However I had to get that issue out in the open. The Zune is at this moment syncing my music. More to come in my next review.
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